Related papers: Stretching short biopolymers by fields and forces
We study the propagation of tension caused by an external force along a long polymeric molecule in two different settings, namely along a free polymer in 3d space being pulled from one end, and along a pre-stretched circular polymer,…
Wetting and drying phenomena are studied for flexible and semiflexible polymer solutions via coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations and density functional theory calculations. The study is based on the use of Young's equation for the…
The elasticity of disordered and polydisperse polymer networks is a fundamental problem of soft matter physics that is still open. Here, we self-assemble polymer networks via simulations of a mixture of bivalent and tri- or tetravalent…
Semiflexible polymers are widely used as a paradigm for understanding structural phases in biomolecules including folding of proteins. Here, we compare bead-spring and bead-stick variants of coarse-grained semiflexible polymer models that…
Recently many important biopolymers have been found to possess intrinsic curvature. Tubulin protofilaments in animal cells, FtsZ filaments in bacteria and double stranded DNA are examples. We examine how intrinsic curvature influence the…
The nonequilibrium structural and dynamical properties of semiflexible active polar polymers subject to linear flow are studied by numerical simulations. Filaments are confined in two dimensions and immersed in a fluid described by the…
Directed polymers (strings) and semiflexible polymers (filaments) are one-dimensional objects governed by tension and bending energy, respectively. They undergo unbinding transitions in the presence of a short-range attractive potential.…
In this work, we consider a semi-dilute solution of identical star-polymers, made of attached flexible long polymer chains of the same polymerization degree N. We first compute the effective pair-potential between star-polymers. Such a…
We study the dynamics of a single polymer subject to thermal fluctuations in a linear shear flow. The polymer is modeled as a finitely extendable nonlinear elastic FENE dumbbell. Both orientation and elongation dynamics are investigated…
We theoretically investigate the kinetics of the folding transition of a single semiflexible polymer. In the folding transition, the growth rate decrease with an increase in the number of monomers in a collapsed domain, suggesting that the…
We characterize the fluctuation properties of a polymer chain under external tension and the fluctuation-induced forces between two ring molecules threaded around the chain. The problem is relevant in the context of fluctuation-induced…
We follow the dynamics of an ensemble of interacting self-propelled semi-flexible polymers in contact with a thermal bath. We characterize structure and dynamics of the passive system and as a function of the motor activity. We find that…
Polymer stretching in random smooth flows is investigated within the framework of the FENE dumbbell model. The advecting flow is Gaussian and short-correlated in time. The stationary probability density function of polymer extension is…
The number of allowed configurations of a polymer is reduced by the presence of a repulsive surface resulting in an entropic force between them. We develop a method to calculate the entropic force, and detailed pressure distribution, for…
Stretching an elastic material along one axis typically induces contraction along the transverse axes, a phenomenon known as the Poisson effect. From these strains, one can compute the specific volume, which generally either increases or,…
Motivated by renewed interest in the physics of branched polymers, we present here a complete characterization of the connectivity and spatial properties of $2$ and $3$-dimensional single-chain conformations of randomly branching polymers…
We study the translocation of a semiflexible polymer through extended pores with patterned stickiness, using Langevin dynamics simulations. We find that the consequence of pore patterning on the translocation time dynamics is dramatic and…
We set up an SPDE model for a moving, weakly self-avoiding polymer with intrinsic length $J$ taking values in $(0,\infty)$. Our main result states that the effective radius of the polymer is approximately $J^{5/3}$; evidently for large $J$…
Frontal polymerization is a promising energy-saving method for rapid fabrication of polymer components with good mechanical properties. In these systems, a small energy input is sufficient to convert monomers, from a liquid or soft solid…
By large-scale Monte Carlo simulations of semiflexible polymers in $d=2$ dimensions the applicability of the Kratky-Porod model is tested. This model is widely used as "standard model" for describing conformations and force versus extension…